Lawrence Block - Out on the Cutting Edge

I stood at the bar and ordered a glass of plain soda water. When he brought it I asked if Ballou had been around. “He looked in earlier,” he said. “He might be back later on. You want me to tell him you were looking for him?”

I said it wasn’t important.

He moved off to the far end of the bar. I took a sip or two of my soda water and glanced his way from time to time. Guilty knowledge, Gary had called it, and that was what it felt like. It was hard to be sure of his voice, my caller the other morning had spoken in a hoarse half-whisper, but I had to figure it was him.

I didn’t know how much more I could find out. Or what I could possibly do with whatever I learned.

I must have stood there for half an hour, and he spent all that time down at the other end of the bar. When I left, my glass of soda wasn’t down more than half an inch from the top. He’d forgotten to charge me for it, and I didn’t bother to leave him a tip.

The manager at the Druid’s Castle said, “Oh, sure, Neil. Neil Tillman, sure. What about him?”

“He used to work here?”

“For around six months, something like that. He left sometime in the spring.”

“So he would have been here the same time Paula was here.”

“I think so, but I couldn’t say for certain without looking it up. And the book’s in the owner’s office, and that’s locked up right now.”

“Why did he leave?”

His hesitation was brief. “People come and go,” he said. “Our turnover rate would amaze you.”

“Why did you let him go?”

“I didn’t say we did.”

“But you did, didn’t you?”

He shifted uncomfortably. “I’d rather not say.”

“What was his problem? Was he dealing out of the restaurant? Stealing too much of what came in over the bar?”

“I really don’t feel right talking about it. If you come back tomorrow during the day, you can probably learn what you want to know from the owner. But—”

“He’s a possible suspect,” I said, “in a possible homicide.”

“She’s dead?”

“It’s beginning to look that way.”

He frowned. “I really shouldn’t say anything.”

“You’re not talking for the record. It’ll just be for my own information.”

“Credit cards,” he said. “There was no hard evidence, that’s why I didn’t want to say anything. But it looked as though he was running duplicate slips with customers’ cards. I don’t know just what he was doing or how he was doing it, but there was something shady going on.”

“What did you say when you fired him?”

“I didn’t do it, the owner did. He just told Neil it wasn’t working out, and Neil didn’t push it. That looked pretty much like an admission of guilt, don’t you think? He’d worked here long enough so that you wouldn’t fire him without telling him the reason, but he didn’t want to know.”

“How did Paula fit in?”

“Did she? It never occurred to me that she did. She left on her own, she wasn’t fired, and I’m pretty sure she was still here after we let him go. If she was working with him — well, she could have been, but they never seemed close, you didn’t see them whispering in corners. I never thought of the two of them as involved in any way. There was no gossip, and I certainly didn’t pick up on anything.”

Around midnight I picked up a couple containers of coffee and planted myself diagonally across the street from Grogan’s. I found a doorway and sat there, drinking coffee and keeping an eye on the place. I figured I was reasonably inconspicuous there. There were a lot of guys in doorways, some of them sitting up, some lying down. I was better dressed than most of them, but not by all that much.

Time passed a little faster than when I’d stood around waiting for Gary. My mind would drift, working on a thread of the yarnball it had to grapple with, and ten or fifteen minutes would slip by before I knew it. Throughout it all I kept my eyes pointed at the entrance to Grogan’s. You have to let your mind wander on a stakeout, otherwise you drive yourself crazy with boredom, but you learn to program yourself so that your eyes will bring you back to basics if they register anything you ought to be paying attention to. Now and then some-one would walk in or out of Grogan’s, and that would bring me back from my reverie and I would take note of who it was.

A few minutes after one several people left at once, and moments after that the door opened to release four or five more. The only one I recognized in either batch was Andy Buckley. The door closed after the second group, and a few seconds later the overhead lights went out, leaving the place very dimly lit.

I crossed the street so that I was standing opposite the place. I could see better now, although the doorway I had to lurk in was shallower and not as comfortable. Neil looked to be moving around inside, doing whatever he did to shut the place down for the night. I drew back a little when the door opened and he dragged a Hefty bag out to the street and swung it up into a green Dumpster. Then he went back inside, and I heard the snick of the lock. It was faint, but you could hear it across the street if you were listening for it.

More time passed at a crawl. Then the door opened again and he came out. He drew the steel gates across and locked them. The saloon was still dimly illuminated inside. Evidently those lights stayed on all night for security.

When he had all the padlocks fastened I got to my feet, ready to move off after him. If he took a cab I could forget it, and if he wound up going down into the subway I would probably let him go, but I figured he was odds-on to live somewhere in the neighborhood, and if he walked home it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to tag him. I hadn’t been able to find him listed in the Manhattan phone book, so the easiest way to locate his residence was to let him lead me to it.

I wasn’t sure how I’d play it after that. By ear, probably. Maybe I’d catch up with him on his doorstep and see if he was rattled enough to spill anything. Maybe I’d wait and try to get into his apartment when he was out of it. First, though, I’d follow him and see where he went.

Except he didn’t go anywhere. He just stood there, lurking in his doorway even as I lurked in mine, drawing in his shoulders against the cold, bringing his hands to his mouth and blowing on them. It wasn’t all that cold, but then he didn’t have anything on over the shirt and the vest.

He lit a cigarette, smoked half of it, threw it away. It landed at the curb and sent up a little shower of sparks. As they were dying out, a car heading uptown on Tenth made a right and pulled up in front of Grogan’s, blocking my view of Neil. It was a Cadillac, a long one, silver. The glass was tinted all around and I couldn’t see who was driving, or how many people it held.

For a minute I expected gunshots. I thought I’d hear them, and then the car would pull away fast, and I’d see Neil clutching his middle and sinking to the pavement. But nothing like that happened. He trotted over to the car. The passenger door opened. He got in, closed the door.

The Cadillac pulled away, leaving me there.

Ithought I heard the phone while I was in the shower. It was ringing when I got out. I wrapped a towel around my middle and went to answer it.

“Scudder? Mick Ballou. Did I wake you, man?”

“I was already up.”

“Good man. It’s early, but I have to see you. Say ten minutes? In front of your hotel?”

“Better make it twenty.”

“Sooner if you can,” he said. “We don’t want to be late.”

Late for what? I shaved quickly, put on a suit. I’d spent a restless night, dream-ridden, my dreams full of doorway stakeouts and drive-by shootings. Now it was seven-thirty in the morning and I had a date with the Butcher. Why? For what?